Living in Metric

The US government almost did something bold, sweeping, deep, and utterly rational in the 1970's.

I know Millenials will find this hard to believe. But I lived through it, so I know.

They almost switched to the metric system.

As a 9 year old, my school (Lincoln Elementary in Sioux Falls) force fed me the Mississippi Educational TV show The Metric System. There were 8 episodes, and I can still sing the theme song to this day. If you can't, this clip will help you (or, more accurately, hurt you):

Listen. I have absolutely no musical talent, and I could have written that song.

My brother Jon wrote a parody of it called "Assassination". It goes "you can measure how far from the gun barrel to his head ... with assassination." It was funny in a way only 10-year-old pre-Internet-era boys can appreciate.

Well, you know the rest of the story. About 5 years later, the US Government whined "this is too hard" and just gave up, leaving the Metric System jingles to fly around my generation's brains untethered to outside reality. Not to rag on my country, but I wish the US would give up on good ideas a bit less.

The good news is now I'm in the UK. Metric is everywhere. I can finally put my 50-year old metric knowledge to work.

Why is this knowledge still in my head after 50 years of disuse ... yet I can't remember the name of the that person I just met at the Ceilidh? Such is the wonders of the human mind.

What's the Big Deal?

In case you haven't heard had the marketing spiel, the metric system is just plain better.

Why? Because there ain't no fractions.

Anyone that has to do something crazy like add two fractions with different denominators knows that decimal is just better. Decimals are doable in your head, and easy to type into your iPhone calculator. Fractions are a major PITA for everyone and everything.

This simple fact is so true that the US has done the half-assed thing of mixing US Imperial measurements with decimals. When you fill up your car with petrol ... sorry, gasoline ... you get a decimal amount of gallons rather than gallons, quarts, pints and cups (which would make the LED display about 10 feet long).

But here in the UK, they went full-bore on metric in 1969. Of course money was the biggest reason - they wanted to make trading more seamless between them and Europe. This was a precursor to joining the European Union in 1973 (a partnership they erased with Brexit in 2020).

Speaking of money, around that time the UK had a bigger problem: the money system itself was fractional. A pound was 20 shillings and a shilling was 12 pence - a system you can trace back almost to the first millenium CE. Try splitting a restaurant bill three ways with that.

So on January 1, 1971, a day they call Decimalization day, they declared the pound to be 100 "new pence". The old system had 240 pence to a pound, the new had 100 "new pence" to a pound. This was such a brain buster for buses and the London Underground, they designated special buses for the training:

The point is that, tough as it was, the Brits soldiered through this transition and got a more rational system on the other end. They are tough cookies, those Brits. I mean, they survived the Blitzkrieg after all.

Anyway, all of this change was happening at once. And they didn't have Educational TV shows to drill the stuff in their heads.

Truth be known, the UK is not the metric promised land. Road signs are still in miles and speed limit signs are still MPH. Changing those, which would almost have to be done simultaneously, would cost too much money.

In Theory, Theory and Practice are the same. In Practice, they are not.

I am at a disadvantage. When an entire country (like the UK) is making the transition to a new system (like in 1969), there is camaraderie. There are shared burdens. There are people to help you.

When it's just one person making the transition, I'm on my own. And I look like an idiot.

The petrol stations say "1.47", and I remark "gas is so cheap here!" My Edinburgh companion looks at me like I've grown an extra head.

I look real closely, and ... oh yeah. Pounds per liter. Multiply that out:

£ 1.47 x 3.8 liters per gallon x 1.28 dollars per £ = $7.15 / gallon

Yipes. I'm glad we don't have a car in Edinburgh. But at least all of this is in decimal not fractions, so I can figure it out roughly in my head.

Figuring out stuff in your head is a skill I've dusted off recently. Like cursive writing, I'm pretty sure they don't teach it any formal way in schools these days. But I find it useful for checking my work. After all, the iPhone calculator is 100% accurate ... but not when you punch the decimal point in the wrong place.

From my point of view at least, a metric measurement is better if:

• It has a pretty simple conversion from US
• And it is granular enough to express a measurement accurately
• And you can subdivide it easily with tools

Take for example grams. Grams are da bomb. You generally buy 500 grams of pasta - that is roughly 1 pound. A little more, actually, but only buy a couple of forkfuls. That's easy to convert in your head.

And 1 gram is small enough that it's perfect for weighing out baking ingredients. In fact, even back in the States I use grams for baking. A cup of flour can vary in weight up to 20% on any given day depending on temperature, humidity and the quality of the flour grind. Grams have no such problem.

Liters are so-so. The conversion ratio is pretty good - 250 milliliters (ml) is about a cup. When you're measuring wet ingredients at the cup level, it's actually really nice - a pyrex cup in the UK has ml measurements down the side, and subdividing is easy.

It's not as great with dry ingredients. When you're at the level of teaspoons and tablespoons, the conversion ratios don't work out very well ... but are more important, especially for baking. 20% more baking powder than you need, for example, can wreck your scones. For this reason, most cookbooks in the UK still use teaspoons and tablespoons instead of milliliters. In fact, it's tough to get a set of metric measuring spoons here.

Celsius, on the other hand, just plain sucks. It's one of the few metric measurements that is decidedly less granular than the Fahrenheit. With oven temperatures, this is not a big deal - the thermostat is naturally inaccurate anyway. With outside temperatures, it's terribly inaccurate and there is no fractional celsius units in plain use like milliliters.

For example, in Edinburgh the low today is 7° C and the high is 11° C. That is 44° F to 51° F, which is a fairly large range. Doing the conversion in your head is really awful because you have to offset it with an addition and a fraction.

Amy just sets her phone to Farenheit. I'm too lazy to do that on my phone, and I'm going to resort to memorizing key figures in my head. Like 5° C means winter jacket, 12° means rain jacket, 22° means no jacket (you need all three in Scotland over a six month period).

You Can't Take it With You

My former car, a 2006 Toyota Yaris which I affectionately named Teeny Weeny Weirdomobile, was a "world car". The speedometer was in the middle, and there were glove boxes are both the passenger and driver sides. This is so Toyota could cheaply mount the steering wheel on the left for US and Asia, and the right for British and other drive-on-the-left principalities.

The Yaris, by the way, is insanely popular in Scotland. You can buy one for £22,000, or about $28,000, making is one of the cheapest new cars around, as it is in the U.S. Non-world-cars are expensive because they need to build UK versions specially, and the UK market is just not as big. Smaller demand = bigger cost to produce.

But I don't have a car in Edinburgh anyway, and I certainly wouldn't want to take one home to America. So why bring this up?

Because UK cookbooks have the same problem.

This did not occur to me until I got into Nigel Slater. Nigel Slater was recommended by the Waitrose magazine (Waitrose is the Wegman's of the UK, except 10 times better - but that's a topic for another post). He is a Food Journalist for the Guardian and has written a whole slough of cookbooks ... and a memoir and theater play besides.

His speciality is low-fuss UK seasonal vegetable-forward comfort food. I lifted recipes for Mussel and Smoked Haddock Pie and Soy-Honey Roasted Carrots and Parsnips from his tome A Cook's Book. He's the real deal. I can pop down to the Edinburgh Farmer's Market and get weird vegetables and meat, and Nigel will tell me what do with it. If I can cook great British food, I have Nigel Slater to thank.

A Cook's Book is insanely expensive in America, but I can pick up a cheap copy in one of the many charity shops in Edinburgh (more on that later as well). The problem is it's not the same. There is expressly a US version of the book where all the measurements are non-metric. The UK version is metric. If I had the UK version, I would need to do conversions in my head or on paper. If I needed 500 g of carrots, it'd be nice if Wegmans' scales read in grams as well as pounds ... alas they do not.

So that particular cook book is a custom-made car. There are "world car" cookbooks as well ... like Ottolenghi's. (Ottolenghi again. sigh.) These are quite a bit cheaper because you can print a billion copies in China and ship them anywhere. The recipe looks like this:

So the US and metric are mixed in. You had better read closely! If you set your US oven to 220°F (instead of 220°C), your Hasselback beets will never get done. Or if you throw in 10 oz (instead of 10g) of fresh ginger, your beets will be a firey wasteland. Gaah.

Not to mention that all of these side-by-side measurements make the book longer.

I dunno. I think the US should switch to metric and be done with it. It would make my life easier.

But I live in a country that can't civilly change its president ... much less a whole measurement system.

Perhaps I'm part of the problem. If I all my cookbooks were digital, I could just press a button and switch from one measurement to the other.

As yet, there are no digital cookbooks that I can spill my cup of coffee on. Every cookbook in my kitchen must endure this rite of passage. If a cookbook doesn't have a coffee stain, then I must not be using it ... and off it goes to the Friends of The Library booksale bin.

And so the US is shackled to an inferior measurement system until all us old dead-tree-hugging farts die off. At which point AI is going to be doing all of our cooking and driving anyway.

When AI takes over, it can use any damn measurement system it wants. Fractions. Decimals. Counting on fingers. Does AI even have fingers? I couldn't care less.